The present disclosure relates to technology for automated product demonstration.
Sales people often use presentations as means for demonstrating products to customers. For instance, a presentation may be created using a slide show presentation program like Microsoft PowerPoint®. However, once created, the content of such presentations is generally singular, fixed, and requires manual adaptation if presented to different audiences. As a result, such presentations often include content that is irrelevant, uninteresting, or stale for the viewing audience, which results is lower sales. In some cases, sales people and or web marketers may use a curated video-based product demonstration accessible online, such as on a website. However, like the above slide-based presentations, many video demos on websites are one-size-fits-all, meaning that there is one large video that covers several product features or benefits, forcing the viewer to either sit through the video or jump around looking for what is important to them. In further cases, more complex product video demonstrations may be offered but even then the viewer must manually select from a list or menu to launch what he or she perceives, but is not sure to be the desired demonstration.
In web marketing visitors are sometimes encouraged to submit their contact information in exchange for a document or set of documents when visiting a website. For instance, the documents may be inaccessible until a given visitor submits relevant contact information via an online form, and the website may then make the documents available for download or send them via email. However, the documents, or libraries of documents, are not customized to the specific needs of the user or integrated with other dynamic content being viewed by or demonstrated to the user. Rather, the documents are static and consist of the same material regardless of the user downloading them or other content being consumed by or demonstrated to the user in real-time. Thus, the documents often do not satisfy the website visitor's unique needs.
During a sales process, a salesperson may send collateral to a prospective customer. For instance, a sales person or group might send documents or even links to videos, including links to product demonstration slides or videos. For instance, current solutions allow you to send a link to a video (such as sending a YouTube video link) to someone. However, these solutions do not reliably indicate when they watched it, who they shared it with, and what they thought was important in the video.
Gathering analytics for web activity is common through such services as Google Analytics. These types of website analytics allow marketers to learn information such as answers to questions like “What browser are website visitors using to view my site?” or “How did visitors get to my site?” However, web analytics technology do NOT answer questions such as “What parts of my product are most important to my customers?”, “What market segment are my website visitors from?”, or “What objections do website visitors have to my product?” Web analytics are also unable to reliably indicate specific buying interest information about website visitors. Currently web marketers try to solve this problem through the use of surveys served up to users during visits to various websites. However, website visitors have little motivation to complete the surveys, and the thus often consider the surveys to be a nuisance. Thus, these surveys have low response rates.